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Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

Google quit. Google always quits. Google is terrible at products. It's simple.

I enjoy reading a detailed analysis of a product's failure, but at the same time, lets remember that Google's leadership tends to fail the same way, over and over again.

I assume that Google is trying to follow a "fail fast" philosophy, so if a product does not do well in a set time frame, it is shut down. That is a great strategy for conserving capital. But it does mean that Google won't get into some markets, because other players are simply more patient, and are willing to stay in longer and get through the rough phase.

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I was thinking yesterday that, in this aspect, Google is very much like General Motors during the decline years of the '70s and '80s. General Motors also had a similar habit where they'd bring out a new model (which would of course have issues). Then, they'd devote an enormous amount of time and money iterating on the model. And finally, just as the model started to show signs of market success they'd cancel it, and go back step 1. Meanwhile, their competition from Japan was steadily iterating and perfecting a stable lineup of vehicles

Sometimes I think that the only reason Google has maintained its level of success is that there is no Toyota or Honda equivalent for GM-Google.

There are multiple. Fb is one, slack and zoom is eating into enterprise communications etc... Plenty of competition where google couldn't take off.

Disclaimer: former google employee

But Google still dominates Ad Space and Search (which is connected). And they still dominate search, growth rates for competitors don't really seem meaningful compared to Google's market volume. And unless governments step in, search market share will secure their dominance on the ads market.

So unless someone manages to offer a superior (not just comparable) search experience, Google will continue to thrive despite all other products.

True, search is google's moat.

However, most people now go to amazon.com to find out what they want to buy. I still use G for comparison purposes, but it is becoming less and less.

On the consumer side, user's time is now going into all sorts of apps from IG, FB, SNAP, Twitter, Games etc... The only thing that google has some handle on is Games through play store and display network. I guess play store is another big money maker for google.

Google has a really good product line up - don't get me wrong, i love photos, docs, gmail, search, android, hangouts. But we seemed to have been missing something there with widespread adoption and monetization. Disclaimer: Former Google, current FB employee.

> However, most people now go to amazon.com to find out what they want to buy.

Maybe by frequency of purchase, but probably not by value. When I was car shopping, I used Google quite a bit to look up dealerships, reviews, etc. Did I use Amazon? Not even once. When I was looking at vacation destinations (prior to COVID cancelling all travel plans) likewise, I was using Google, not Amazon. Same with researching my last laptop purchase (which I ended up buying directly from Lenovo).

I use Amazon a lot, but I would guess that measured by dollar value, my off Amazon purchases are much greater than my Amazon purchases. Measured by number of purchases, of course, I've made many more transactions on Amazon than I have off of it.

you are likely correct. i use google flights, i would search on google for a car.

but fb is coming up with marketplace, ig has shopping related stuff, so i am not sure who the winner will be. It may end up with two companies sharing the market.

Not true. Search doesn't matter if people aren't there. I search on Amazon for stuff. I search on reddit for questions I have. I search on FB marketplace if I wanna get something 2nd hand. I post on FB group specific to topic. I use slack or discord to ask questions from live experts.

So yes they dominate the search, but "search" isn't what it could have been. I always thought how would someone ever defeat current giants. And while I heard the phrase I didn't get it, the next Facebook won't look like Facebook. Giants simply become irrelevant they are not defeated just forgotten.

The reference to Japan also brought up memories of Sony's brilliant play in the (admittedly declining) Camera market - starting off as a joke, then acquiring Minolta (not exactly a prestigious brand) and now being bigger than Canon and Nikon. In contrast, Pentax, which once ruled the Camera market (not to speak of Kodak..), is not even acknowledged by Ricoh today.

Tony Northrup's vlog on this is very interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVW18cGdfUU

From the outside, around 2000, I used to marvel at Nokia's ability to deliver. Then after starting work there and seeing "how the sausage is made" I switched to marvelling at the implication that all of their competitors must somehow do it even worse...

My take is that they probably just don’t care enough. It’s like Intel and their forays into all kinds of adventures outside of processors. Eventually these things are so small compared to their dominance in the core market that as an organization they simply don’t care enough to make it work.

It probably started as an initiative of someone high enough to get the resources, but the org never doubled down on it or change one inch of its roadmap to make it work.

Google had the first mover in modern email and maps and had very easy onboarding for both from search. Google somehow made Android work (which seems like a miracle in retrospect) and also Chrome (some would say they had to make Chrome work), but that’s all I can think of (it’s still huge, obviously, but also narrow in scope for an organization with that magnitude of resources).

As long as Google is filled with connected, talented, bored people it will keep pushing out all sorts of product experiments.

Google also doesn't live up to its standards, at least regarding Android apps.

Take Google Photos, for example. I have a biking app which automatically makes photos when a geofence is entered, stores them into DCIM/biking. So per ride I get a set of about 20 photos.

The first time a photo was made, Google Photos asked me if it should include that those photos in auto-upload. Yes, I wanted that.

Now, after the bike ride, I have to start the Google Photos app, wait for some seconds until it detects the photos, then manually close it (swipe up), reopen it, wait a couple of seconds until it finds another new picture which it missed in the first pass, close it, reopen it, wait, close, reopen, wait.

I need to do this about 5 times, because for some reason the app doesn't find all the photos in the directory at once.

It's not only this biking app and not only with DCIM subfolders. Any added folder which receives photos, and most noticeable with apps which take a sequence of them automatically is affected.

I don't get it how something as trivial as globbing a directory gets it past Google's testing standards.

There might be a weird setting that's not working properly. This is not happening to me.

it might be that the biking app is not calling MediaScanner after taking the picture.

This does sound like the app doesn't register photos correctly in the MediaStore. Or perhaps the phone didn't start the maintenance window to start the uploads - Android (like iOS) doesn't continiously scan filesystems since that would destroy the battery.

The biking app isn't calling MediaScanner at all. The thing is that once Google Photos is opened, it scans all the directories which it is supposed to watch. Then it also does find photos, you can see it getting populated with the new images one after another, but it always misses some.

That's what I'm referring to. In this context, you can't blame any third party app.

I was working on a video recording app and without calling MediaScanner, recorded videos would not show up in file managers or media apps. Android has a cache layer for file system access that needs poking if you create new or change files.

Yes your app's bug is a systematic problem at Google. Then again these are the kind of click baity comments that are upvoted against Google.

I'll agree with this. Wave launched with an incredibly broad set of things built-in... and then saw next to no changes whatsoever until its shutdown.

Granted, they probably didn't see the usage they hoped for... but that's extremely common for a brand new thing. It takes a few iterations to get something that fits the market. It's part of what makes waterfall strategies so problematic: you have one shot, and it'll usually miss.

It had been invite-only for most of its life and only opened to the general public for something like a month or less before its shutdown. It would have been dumb for Google to shut it down on "lack of usage" if their own artificial barriers were the reason for such.

Lack of usage is getting a lot of blame in these threads, but let's not forget it was most likely a Google+ related strategic decision. Wave was built with an XMPP-like or email-like federation model in mind and was shutdown in basically the exact same cohort with XMPP-based Google Talk and RSS-based Google Reader. Google was strategically no longer interested in standards-based (or standards-aspiring perhaps in the case of Wave) social networks.

This makes me wonder how much different things would be if Google had doubled downed on an Open Social (tm) model instead of trying to me-too Facebook et. al. by building a walled garden (more like a walled dirt lot I guess)

Sometimes they do the opposite, like trying to shove an obviously subpar product [Google+] down everybody's throat. Both approaches are bad strategies.

Tech follows a power law. Putting more work into something doesn't necessarily make it better. It could just be a bad idea no matter what. So failing fast is a good thing.

Google made the right call with Wave, finally. The better call would have been to not release it.

> The better call would have been to not release it.

Why's that? Wave wasn't a humiliating mess. It turned out not to really fit anywhere, but that's the kind of thing you learn by letting people try the product, no?

Google dogfooded Wave before releasing it publicly.

My question stands.

> It turned out not to really fit anywhere, but that's the kind of thing you learn by letting people try the product, no?

Google let people try it before releasing it publicly.

I still don't see why Google shouldn't have released it. I already pointed out that Wave's problem was that it never found its place, despite a solid implementation, which is just the sort of issue that makes itself clear after being released to the public.

Yes, Gmail FAILED Android FAILED Chrome FAILED. Let's not forget the elephant in the room SEARCH also FAILED.

Also saving capital but a 10yr bet on self driving cars.

To be fair, Gmail and Chrome are 16 years old, and Google acquired Android 15 years ago. Their main search algorithm of course was developed over 21 years ago. That doesn't leave a good track record for the last 15 years or so...

There's nothing on par with the main search product, but here are some of their products that seem successful from the 2010s: Google Drive, Google Flights, Google Hangouts, Tensorflow, and Google Photos. This isn't an attempt to be an exhaustive list, but these are all products that a lot of people on this board probably use frequently and have stuck for years.

I wonder if anyone else was surprised by how useful Google Keep is, and how it doesn't seem to get any publicity (like people don't seem to know about it, but when I've introduced it to family members they've generally loved it).

Also I really like my Google home, Pixel phone, and Nest cameras -- privacy concerns aside :grimace:

Sadly, Keep fits the pattern of a good but not wildly successful product that will likely receive an "Update On" notice someday.

I tried Keep, it is OK but the refusal to add an API is scary. It looks like it will not be a product integrated or supported like the others are.

Hangouts is an example of a failure: Google had a huge hit with Talk/Hangouts and for a while it was THE leading chat app. ...And then they mostly abandoned it, told everyone to use one of a half dozen different replacements which all failed as people moved onto other things. Had they continued to modernize and prioritize Hangouts, all of the newer chat startups would never have even existed. It "won" the early chat app fight and basically heralded the death of AIM, YIM, and MSN messenger, only to be murdered in-house by Google's own product teams.

Google Photos I think is reasonably successful, but mostly as "where your Android's photos end up". I am not sure how many people have a strong relationship with Google Photos. And I still hear about people upset about Google killing Picasa in favor of it. It is worth nothing that Picasa, the foundation of Photos, was not something Google developed, but something Google acquired from outside.

For my social group.. what killed MSN was a combination of Facebook and moving to mobile.

Picasa was damn good software. I still miss it.

It gets ever-more rickety but it's still usable, and I still use it: the combination of decent face recognition, useful tools, fast UI, locally-stored photos is a combination that I value and I've yet to find an acceptable substitute on Windows or Linux.

Have you considered Digikam? It does a lot more, but you don't have to use that.

If it gets too rickety for you, you should try PhotoStructure. It's locally hosted, can be run on docker/headless or on a desktop, the libraries are read/writeable across platforms, and it has the most robust asset merging and tag inference that I'm aware of.

My beta users are using it for free in exchange for their feedback. I'm hoping to release the final beta within a week. After beta there will be free and paid tiers.

Changelog: https://photostructure.com/about/release-notes/

I disagree, Google Hangouts was a failure from the start.

Former Google Talk supported XMMP, including federation, which meant you could connect with multiple clients and talk with people talk with people that don't have Google accounts.

With Hangouts politics took over. They eventually told people the line about XMMP not evolving fast enough for their needs. But I remember their leadership complaining about their competition not playing nice.

So when Hangouts happened I saw absolutely no reason to use it. There were plenty of alternatives on the market already, at work we were all using Skype. And at that time I was working with former Googlers that preferred Google's shit.

You might give me the line about the general population not caring, bla, bla, but Google is in the habit of betraying their power users and early adopters. They did it with Google Reader. They did it with Inbox.

And I was actually glad to see Hangouts fail. It might have been a good implementation of yet another chat app, but few people cared.

Edit: why is this being downvoted? My point was that even the things listed as recent successes are not especially recent.

—————————-

Flights is from 2011, nine years ago. And they bought the logic at the core of it from ITA.

Google drive is a genuine success, but from 2012, eight years ago.

Even hangouts, which is a failure, is from 2013.

What became Tensorflow appears to have begun seeing internal use in 2009-11.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Flights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Drive

Discounting tensorflow is such a ridiculous argument. All of these products were used internally in some way or form before released outside. You will find some reason or the other to not count successes.

I’m not discounting it. My point is that it doesn’t seem especially recent.

Even by official public release it’s almost five years old.

The OP was arguing that google had had several recent successes, but their list tends to be 5+ years old. The point is that such a list is not especially convincing.

I should note that my point in mentioning the early origins of tensorflow was that google had a reputation for being more innovative in those years. So it is also meaningful that Tensorflow’s origins are from that period.

Google’s modern reputation is introducing a new chat app each year and deprecating the old one.

That's the reputation HN wants to impose. Especially the people who couldn't clear the interviews.

Do you have any recent successful products you can mention? I’m open to there being some.

I think you’re adding stuff into my comment that’s not there. My point was that nothing on the list was from newer than 2015. Except maybe google photos, but that came out of Picasa/Google+

Google Flights is great but of course Google had nothing to do with it. ITA Matrix was an eerily-useful flight-finding tool for many years before Google bought it and renamed it.

Photos has some kind of weird resolution limitation that turned me off the product immediately. (Plus I'm not crazy about Google having all my personal photos to mine.)

Tensorflow seems pretty good; I'd prefer not to be controlling high-speed computational resources with a super-slow interpreted language that cannot even multitask, but everything runs on Python nowadays.

I don't use the rest enough to comment.

Python can multitask. There's a global lock, but most time consuming things don't hold it, so these things run in true parallel.

Photos allows you to upload in original quality. You can always pay for services.

Drive, Photos, Tensorflow. Are you going to choose another arbitrary time period ? I"ll still come up with products.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_s...

Also: https://killedbygoogle.com

I have also noticed how few people use any of these products :D

I think the real problem is when google releases a free[1] product they have a track record of discontinuing them seemingly (from user's point of view) at random so that people are beginning to feel that it's not safe to build on any new products from them.

[1] "Free" in this case meaning actually free, e.g. doesn't actively support their core spying + advertising business

Did you miss this?

> so if a product does not do well in a set time frame, it is shut down

Gmail was a success from the beginning. Android is doing pretty well. Chrome did a mix of growth because it was just better at the time, and ads which made it popular. They all did very well.

> Gmail was a success from the beginning

Interestingly, I don't think that was obvious from inside the company.

Maybe some day this will be declassified by one of the early PMs or engineers, it's a great story.

Interesting. The amount of invite code sharing / trading was huge from the moment I learned about gmail. I'd love to hear the story of the issues!

I remember a lot of buzz around invites for Google+, too.

And early on, despite a lot of anti-marketing that I still suspect was simply bought by FB, it was really great and vibrant. In its most original implementation, even.

Later on, the campaign of "complaints" about how empty it was got them to change bits of it, pushing "follow those people" on you that was filled with brain-numbing celebs and the like, and the magic was gone.

Whoever orchestrated that campaign should get a raise (and shouldn't meet me, as G+ was last web-based social media that I could earnestly use)

Some thing driving the invites was the promise of some GB of free storage, which some people abused in creative ways via their APIs (I remember a fuse driver storing files as mail attachments ...)

I believe it was an internal product before it was ever a publicly available one. IIRC it was successful inside and was public dogfooding at that point. Maybe I am mis-remembering.

I mean if they don't try things - "Google just sits on cash". If they do try things and fail "Google just kills products". HN will never be happy with what Google does. I just wish people here are consistent with these attitudes across companies.

There are other options than not do anything or kill what you don't need. For example the news reader could be easily split off or sold. theoldreader seems to be doing well even though they had to reimplement the whole service.

Wave got partially opensourced, after a while. I'm sure someone would buy Google trips.

Sure, Google itself wouldn't benefit much from those, but if they're killing the service anyway, it would improve the image.

> For example the news reader could be easily split off or sold

For things on the Google stack selling isn't really easy.

Things they acquired , like picassa, could probably be sold again, but there they wanted to migrate to Google Photos.

>> For example the news reader could be easily split off or sold

> For things on the Google stack selling isn't really easy.

If Google would build their new products using only publicly available GCP features, that would be a really smart move.

It would signal that they're confident enough about GCP to build their own products on it, and they can spin off products that are small successes but not large enough to move the needle at Google scale. Or if they're not profitable, open source them and allow people to run their own instance of it on GCP if they want.

Interestingly one of the few things they spun off - Niantic (ingress/Pokemon go) runs on Google app engine (and/or other Google cloud offerings)

Please apply the same standards to other companies. How many big tech sell off killed products. There are numerous IP issues etc.. Not to mention how ingrained these products are to internal infra. Google is pretty good about open sourcing internal libraries as a counter point.

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